A SLASHING ATTACK

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 626, 1 April 1929, Page 14

A SLASHING ATTACK

CURSE OF DICTATORS WORSE THAN PLAGUE There is not a dictatorship in Europe that does not rule by black-and-tannery, says the “Manchester Guardian.” It is a mistake to suppose that a dictatorship brings the able to the top. The exact opposite is true—it eliminates the courageous, the critical, the intelligent. The able have no chance at all except in so far as they are servile, unscrupulous and never openly critical. It is commonly supposed that democracy is a form of mob rule and a dictatorship is the rule of the elite. Again the exact opposite is true. A dictatorship is organised mob rule through organised lynch law. All great dictators arc great demagogues. They are Often Popular

No Premier ill any European democracy has so many catch-phrases as Mussolini or Pilsudski and can call forth popular applause so blind and hysterical. It is a mistake to suppose that dictatorships are necessarily unpopular. They are often popular, and even if they are, as in Hungary, the retrograde domination of a privileged and oppressive minority, they still have some measure of mob support. When they appeal to the emotions of the mob it is nearly always to the bad emotions. In Italy and Russia those masses that can be reached by public speeches, newspapers and radio are continually being whipped up into paroxysms of boastful malignant jingoism. Dictatorships thrive only in a warlike atmosphere, and if their foreign policies are peaceful it is only because they are not strong enough to fight. Living in Fear All dictatorships isolate themselves in their own countries by the irrevocable laws of their own nature. Between the rulers and the ruled there is no contact save through spies, agents and eavesdroppers, through appeals to mob emotions, and through outbursts of mob emotion. The rulers inspire fear and live in fear. There is not a dictator in Europe whose life is safe. What really happens among the people, what they think and feel, what new ideas and movements are being born (in so far as, under the terror, they are not stillborn) —all these things remain dark and secret until the dictatorship, weakened, corrupted and stultified by Its own isolation and by the use of uncontrolled, unchecked, violent power, fails and is overthrown. There is probably not a dictatorship in Europe that is not doomed to perish by violence. Legalised Lynching In no dictatorship is there any justice. Trials are inquisitions or legalised lyncliings. If they are held in public it is so that justce may he smothered by the emotions of the mob. If they are held in secret it is through fear lest these emotions may not be violent enough to smother justice. And often there is no trial at all, and the accused is secretly imprisoned, exiled, shot or hanged by administrative order; the prisons and places of exile under all dictatorships are full of innocent men and women. Nor is there a dictatorship that is not corrupt and inefficient compared with the European democracies. Dictatorships solve no problem; they perpetuate nothing hut themselves. The terror, when it begins, is always announced as a transition measure, but it never remains the servant and always becomes the master of the dictator.

Indeed, it is doubtful whether tire effects of a dictatorship can disappear before decades or even centuries have passed, and it almost seems as though the blood of some peoples had been poisoned incurably and for ever by long subjection to dictatorial rule. A dictatorship is the greatest calamity that can befall a nation. It Is worse than plague, flood, famine or war.